Bradley Birkenfeld is the most significant financial whistleblower of all time, so you might think he’d be cheering on the disclosures in the new Panama Papers leaks. But today, Birkenfeld is raising questions about the source of the information that is shaking political regimes around the world.
“The CIA I’m sure is behind this, in my opinion,” Birkenfeld said.
– From the CNBC article: Swiss Banker Whistleblower: CIA Behind Panama Papers
Last Friday, I published a post titled, Was the Panama Papers “Leak” a Russian Intelligence Operation? Here’s some of what I wrote:
Initially, this seemed to be a theory worth exploring, but in the following days I’ve come to a far different conclusion. The primary divergence between what I currently believe and what Mr. Murray proposed is that I do not think the leaker was a genuine whistleblower motived by the public interest. I think the leaker was working on behalf of a sophisticated intelligence agency.
The fact that we seem to know nothing about “John Doe” concerns me. Say what you will about Edward Snowden, but he came out publicly shortly after his whistleblowing and offered himself up for the world to judge. His life, career and personality have been put on full display, and each and every one of us has had the opportunity to decide for ourselves whether his motivations were noble and pure or not.
With the Panama Papers’ “John Doe” we are given no such opportunity, and in fact, the whole thing reads very much like a script concocted by some big budget intelligence agency. Once I started coming around to this conclusion, the obvious choice was U.S. intelligence; given the lack of implications to powerful Americans, the clownishly desperate attempts to smear Putin, and the appearance of Soros, USAID, Ford Foundation, etc, linked organizations to the reporting.
So for someone who already thinks the whole Panama Papers story stinks to high heaven, a CIA link to the release seems obvious; but is it too obvious? Perhaps.
At this point, I want to make something perfectly clear. I do not profess to know the “real story” behind the Panama Papers. The truth is, nobody knows, except for John Doe and the people he was working for (or with). The only thing I feel fairly confident about is that the story we are being fed is not the real story. The more I read and reflect upon the very minor consequences of the leak thus far, the more I become convinced this was a geopolitical play by a powerful intelligence agency. At first, I assumed it was U.S. intelligence, but Mr. Gaddy puts forth a compelling theory. If this was the work of the CIA, it was an extremely sloppy and obvious hit job. On the other hand, if this was the work of Putin for the purposes of blackmail, it’s one of the most ingenious chess moves I’ve ever seen played on the global stage.
The main point I was trying to hammer home with that post was the fact that I did not believe the Panama Papers was an altruistic act of heroic whistleblowing, but that it was an intelligence operation. I went on to say that I thought the notion it was a Russian job was plausible merely because if it was indeed a CIA operation (as I initially suspected), we would have to accept that the agency is mind-bogglingly sloppy and clownish. Nevertheless, according to notorious Swiss bank whistleblower, Bradley Birkenfeld, this is the work of the CIA.
CNBC reports:
Bradley Birkenfeld is the most significant financial whistleblower of all time, so you might think he’d be cheering on the disclosures in the new Panama Papers leaks. But today, Birkenfeld is raising questions about the source of the information that is shaking political regimes around the world.
Birkenfeld, an American citizen, was a banker working at UBS in Switzerland when he approached the U.S. government with information on massive amounts of tax evasion by Americans with secret accounts in Switzerland. By the end of his whistleblowing career, Birkenfeld had served more than two years in a U.S. federal prison, been awarded $104 million by the IRS for his information and shattered the foundations of more than a century of Swiss banking secrecy.
In an exclusive interview Tuesday from Munich, Birkenfeld said he doesn’t think the source of the 11 million documents stolen from a Panamanian law firm should automatically be considered a whistleblower like himself. Instead, he said, the hacking of the Panama City-based firm, called Mossack Fonseca, could have been done by a U.S. intelligence agency.
“The CIA I’m sure is behind this, in my opinion,” Birkenfeld said.
Birkenfeld pointed to the fact that the political uproar created by the disclosures have mainly impacted countries with tense relationships with the United States. “The very fact that we see all these names surface that are the direct quote-unquote enemies of the United States, Russia, China, Pakistan, Argentina and we don’t see one U.S. name. Why is that?” Birkenfeld said. “Quite frankly, my feeling is that this is certainly an intelligence agency operation.”
Asked why the U.S. would leak information that has also been damaging to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, a major American ally, Birkenfeld said the British leader was likely collateral damage in a larger intelligence operation.
“If you’ve got NSA and CIA spying on foreign governments they can certainly get into a law firm like this,” Birkenfeld said. “But they selectively bring the information to the public domain that doesn’t hurt the U.S. in any shape or form. That’s wrong. And there’s something seriously sinister here behind this.”
This just further confirms my belief that this whole “leak” isn’t what we are being told. This is the work of an intelligence agency working on behalf of a particular government, not on behalf of the public.
Don’t be duped.
For related articles, see:
Was the Panama Papers “Leak” a Russian Intelligence Operation?
Are Corporate Gatekeepers Protecting Western Elites from the Leaked Panama Papers?
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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Unfortunately, there is likely some truth to this article.
It sure seems tempting to conclude that some intelligence agency must be behind the hack of Mossack Fonseca, given that we are talking about 2.6 terabytes of data.
However, there are some interesting things to note:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers
“The leaked documents number 11.5 million and were created between the 1970s and late 2015 by Mossack Fonseca.”
“More than a year before the April 2016 release of the leaked documents, an anonymous source who identified himself as “John Doe” offered German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) large caches of sensitive banking documents.”
If this would have been one big data grab in one go, then the suspicion of an intelligence agency being involved would make a lot of sense.
However, we are talking about a period between at least April 2015 and “late 2015” during which the data has been gradually downloaded. When we assume the hacker to have been downloading continuously 24/7 for half a year (182 days), he would need to download at an average speed of 2.6*1024*1024/(182*24*60)= 10.4 MB/minute, or just 177.5 kB/sec. Well within the capacity of a reasonable home wide band internet connection.
Further, Mossack Fonseca had “really very low security level”, according to security intelligence source quoted by “The Register”, an online IT magazine:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/11/hackers_pwn_mossack_fonseca/
“SQL injection vuln found at Panama Papers firm Mossack Fonseca
Grey hat security researchers have discovered new flaws in the systems of Panama leak firm Mossack Fonseca.
A self-styled “underground researcher” claims to have found a SQL injection flaw on one of the corporate systems of the Panamanian lawyers.
“They updated the new payment CMS, but forgot to lock the directory /onion/,” he said via the “1×0123” Twitter profile.
[…]
The lawyers informed clients in early April that the leak to journalists has been traced back to a hack on its email server, rather than a whistleblower. Its apparent failure to adequately lock down its systems is surprising in the circumstances.
“It looks like MF [Mossack Fonseca] had really very low security level, [such] that hackers continue to hack them for fun,” a security intelligence source who notified us of the claimed vulnerability told El Reg.”
Wired, also an online IT magazine, gives some more detail:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2016-04/06/panama-papers-mossack-fonseca-website-security-problems
“The front-end computer systems of Mossack Fonseca are outdated and riddled with security flaws, analysis has revealed.
The law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers hack has shown an “astonishing” disregard for security, according to one expert.
[…]
On its main website Mossack Fonseca claims its Client Information Portal provides a “secure online account” allowing customers to access “corporate information anywhere and everywhere”. The version of Drupal used by the portal has at least 25 vulnerabilities, including a high-risk SQL injection vulnerability that allows anyone to remotely execute arbitrary commands.
[…]
Professor Alan Woodward, a computer security expert from Surrey University told WIRED that Mossack Fonseca’s front end seemed “horribly” out of date.”
Woodward continued: “If I were a betting man I would place a two way bet between an external hacker who got lucky by probing, was shocked by what they saw and leaked it, and a nation state fed up with tax avoidance.”
So, while it may be tempting to conclude that an intelligence agency must have been behind the hack, the security level at the firm’s servers and the long time the hacker had at his disposal makes it just as plausible that a group of hackers or even a single hacker was behind the attack.
As I posted before, I find it intriguing that WikiLeaks clearly suggests it has the data:
http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2016/04/08/was-the-panama-papers-leak-a-russian-intelligence-operation/#comment-112376
-:-
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/716772373408718849
“Should we release all 11 million #PanamaPapers so everyone can search through them like our other publications?”
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/718171102166585344
“3 days to go: With 86,987 votes counted over 95% demand full disclosure of #PanamaPapers”
The first tweet already suggests they have the files, but it could also be interpreted as a call upon ICIJ to release the files. With the second tweet, there is no doubt in my mind that WikiLeaks will release the whole thing, perhaps even as soon as Monday. If there is one thing I know about WikiLeaks and their culture, it is that they do not bluff.
They HAVE the data and they WILL release the whole thing.
-:-
Note that in their first tweet, they explicitly say “Should WE release…?” instead of something like “should the Panama papers be released?”
So, I still feel very confident that WikiLeaks has the data, so which we can speculate that the original hacker leaked the data to WikiLeaks, as is considered good practice the hacking community. And that WikiLeaks is playing a game with the MSM in order to show the world what the MSM mean by “responsible reporting”.
Isn’t it interesting that the MSM every now and then sneers at WikiLeaks that they know much better how to do “responsible reporting”?
And the more one looks at the tweets, the more interesting this theory becomes. Let’s start at the beginning, the WikiLeaks tweets from April 3d:
6:33 PM: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7166649844078387211
“ANNOUNCE: In under two hours, the Panama Papers – massive offshore leak exposes the dirty dealings of hundreds of famous figures, orgs.”
7:00 PM: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/716671769902456832
“Billionaires, presidents, killers, banks, drug lords, ministers… in massive offshore leak. One hour to go. #PanamaPapers”
7:11 PM: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/716674552315715586
“In just under an hour over one hundred media outlets around the world will start publishing the #PanamaPapers”
Compare this by Sueddeutsche Zeitung’s first tweets since March 12th. Also on April 3d:
7:00PM: https://twitter.com/SZ_Investigativ/status/716671760662466561
“One year of research, 400 reporters, 80 countries, 100+ mediums. And it all started out at Süddeutsche Zeitung. Stay tuned for #panamapapers”
7:18 PM: https://twitter.com/rtwSZ/status/716676134038061056
“Will jemand wissen, womit wir hier die letzten Nächte verbracht haben? #panamapapers @SZ_Investigativ”
(Does anyone want to know, where we over here spent the past nights on?)
7:39 PM: https://twitter.com/SZ_Investigativ/status/716681652248961025
“Before we go live the @SZ #panamapapers team @b_obermayer @f_obermaier @Remrow wants to say thank you to @ICIJorg & all involved reporters”
Then they announce they went live, by *retweeting* a tweet by none other than Edward Snowden:
7:48PM: https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/716683740903247873
“Biggest leak in the history of data journalism just went live, and it’s about corruption. http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/en/ ”
To sum this up: WikiLeaks anounced the Panama papers half an hour *before* the Sueddeutsche first tweeted about them *and* SD announced they went live by retweeting Edward Snowden.
I don’t know what is going on exactly, but I’m all the more certain now that WikiLeaks has the data AND has been involved with the project.
I guess we’ll find out pretty soon what more is in those files. 😀